Tuesday Weld

She is a wolf disguised as a sheep, lurking to prey on the weaker wolf.
Her simultaneously sheepish and volpine smile blatantly admits as much;
those attracted are quick to claim deceit when they were merely outsmarted.

That smile, that smile... a George Herriman moon under two sadly impossible
stars shining black in a pale night sky. Her small gappily placed teeth are a physical -- thus cinematic -- emblem
of the eternally enticing but unbridgeable distance between predator and lover,
between dream and reality. They represent the generative nature of all gaps,
teasingly opposed by her "family" name while her "given" name hints at the
god of conflict. Is it any wonder that she played a matricide in the '60s, and later
starred in Mother and Daughter: The Loving War?

As Thalia Menninger, the tragic eternal return among Dobie Gillis's many loves,
she pointedly capped America's harsh social pyramid. Like other marks of
capitalist aristocracy, Thalia seemed achingly available to any male who
could construct the approved magical signs of "maleness" with a simulacrum of
ease, and yet always remained out of reach, a materialist will-of-the-wisp.
Appropriately, "Thalia Menninger" suggests both comic muse and nerve disease: class mobility
is our country's true belle dame sans merci.

In 1956's Rock, Rock, Rock, Weld established the places of Alan
Freed, Frankie Lymon (recently admitted into the Rock Hall of Fame, itself named
after her film), and Chuck Berry in the American consciousness, while again
symbolizing (if any presence so thoroughgoingly physical can be
called symbolic -- but she embodies the ethereal, and, by her contrast, fades the
real to misty backdrop) the painful yet erotic, uneven and widely-spaced bitemark
which protein-hungry economics leaves on the apparently yielding flesh of love.

Career tragedy struck in 1960's beautifully titled but imperfectly executed
Sex Kittens Go To College, in which Mamie Van Doren
("What does she do? Sag?" -- Lou Reed) usurped Weld's natural
role of un-interpreted genius. Weld retired, reflected, and returned,
cardiac tissue toughened, determined to build a meaningful career of such demeaning
roles.

1966's Lord Love A Duck was the first of might be termed the
Dobie-deconstructions. Here Roddy McDowell plays a young upstart whose
intellect (clearly signalled by a mid-Atlantic accent) is only surpassed by the passion
inspired by Weld. Our Mephistophelean Helen easily reduces the owlish McDowell to hawk-like
screeching and mowing down of suburbanites, ironically paralleling both the
bloody technocrats who conducted the Vietnam war and the impending revolutionary
fervor which would reap Richard Nixon as its reward.

In 1968, Anthony Perkins was teamed with Weld for the first time. Their
Pretty Poison (760K)
begins as comic eco-terrorism and ends in nuclear
family disaster. Perkins's charmingly awkward sociopath makes a
fetching Dobie to Weld's jeune fille fatale; one can only wish that this jaundiced
stereoscopic vision had been trained on a series of such counterculture absurdities.

1970's I Walk the Line features Gregory Peck as an unusually dignified
Dobie, with Weld, as a moonshiner's daughter, proving that the erotic lure of class mobility
is as fatally effective in a downward direction as in an upward.

This happiest stage of her career peaked in 1972's Play It As It Lays,
which should have established Weld and Perkins as the Garbo and Gilbert of our time.
For once the splashy, tedious male tragedies
littering the wings of Weld's performance are molted, and we are allowed to
focus on her own eventual tragedy, the Kafkaesque tragedy of a wolf persuaded she's
a maladjusted sheep.

Alas, then as now, nothing was more abhorrent to Hollywood than a great actress
in full posession of her powers, and thereafter she was forced to split her professional
life between large parts in insultingly timid films and insultingly small parts in the
edgy material best suited for her.

1974's Reflections of Murder may be the best of Weld's TV work.
This gloomy damp tale of female semi-solidarity is perfectly
set in a New England college. Sam Waterston, resplendent in elbow patches,
plays Prof. Cha. Pigg, an irritating womanizer familiar to any liberal arts grad; Weld and
Joan Hackett-and-Hackett-and-Hackett play the mistress and the little woman. A
sharp and tidy tale; easy to see why Nazi-collaborator Henri-Georges Clouzot
also took a stab at it, albeit with a far lesser cast.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Once Upon a Time in America
can stand for any number of beautifully played but utterly thankless roles,
each as thinly conceived as an imbecilic scrawl on a toilet stall, each cliché
transmuted by Weld into glimpses of gold behind the foregrounded rubble of
inferior stars-du-jour. Over and over, she transcends the sexist rock-and-hard-place
of Lovable Whore and Frigid Bitch by merging the roles into one mystically feral
intelligence: an emotional travesty drafted into but well done. And such small
portions, too!

Whither Weld?

Perhaps her divine gifts will finally gain wide-spread recognition
with Les Blanks's Gap-Toothed Women and Matthew Sweet's
Girlfriend. Perhaps she'll direct, produce, write, and star in several
high-budget award-winning masterpieces based on the works of nineteenth-century female
novelists. Perhaps she'll meet and marry an unusually sensitive software engineer still
in the prime of his life. But no matter what happens, we -- every one of us -- must
forever treasure the wavering pure flame which she has left like some thoughtless
camper in our hearts, or forever regret the overzealous bear who put it out.
Go see the films of Tuesday Weld.

But how? Much of Weld's best work is unavailable on videocassette and rarely screened
in rep moviehouses. For those of you with thoroughly wired homes in the USA, turn to this month's
collection of cable TV appearances,
as compiled by TVnow.

If you like this site, you won't like the new "biography" of Tuesday Weld,
Pretty Poison "by" Floyd Conner.

On the other hand, noted author and bon vivant Kevin Killian has recently produced a new play, "Wet Paint", in which Tuesday Weld and Leonora Weld appear as characters along with Jay DeFeo, Janis Joplin, Kenneth Anger, and the leads from "I Love Frida". Can Weld's elevation to Andy "The Duck" Warhol levels of iconicity be far behind?

The proud maintainer of the Dobie Gillis site is now the proud owner of a rare autographed photo.
The "Tuesday Weld" section of your local pop record store has expanded to include a rock-and-roll band from Austin, Texas. Lead singer Kevin Brannan was kind enough to send me a copy of "Tuesday Weld"'s eight song CD, Sting of the Pimp Slap. Note the appropriately misogynous title: it's the attention to little details that'll take these boys far. The nice young male speedy poppy punky sound seems much what a 1996 Dobie Gillis would've made in his garage with a baseball-capped and earringed Maynard G. Krebs.
Copyright 1996 Ray Davis